Some places you visit. Others you are changed by. Sand Hill Scout Reservation — thirteen hundred acres of pine, trail and open water in Hernando County — is the ground where our five-day program takes root.
A place built for the outdoors
Sand Hill Scout Reservation is a roughly 1,300-acre camp in Brooksville, Florida, operated by the Greater Tampa Bay Area Council of Scouting America. Its land came to Scouting as a gift from the Die Polder family in the 1970s, and for half a century it has been a working outdoor campus: archery and shooting sports, canoeing, swimming, rappelling, and miles of trail through the Florida woods.
The reservation keeps campsites in use year-round, with pavilions, showers and shaded gathering places set among the pines. It was designed, from the ground up, for people to live outdoors together for days at a time — which is exactly what makes it right for the work we do.
Where young people learn to lead
For generations, Sand Hill has been a place where Scouts and leaders come to build character, confidence and leadership under an open sky. Beyond Scouting units, outside organizations use the camp for training, retreats and gatherings throughout the year.
That mission — growth through the outdoors, in community, away from the noise of ordinary life — is the same current that runs through everything Responders First does. The land already knows how to hold people while they change.
Standing with Responders First
Sand Hill Scout Reservation is where our free five-day wellness program is anchored. This is the partner that provides the land and the lodging where the healing happens: the cabins where responders sleep, the water they paddle, the quiet trails they walk, the fire they gather around at the end of the day.
Accelerated Resolution Therapy, iRest, adaptive yoga and therapeutic music all need a place to unfold, and they unfold here — sheltered by pine, held by open space, far enough from the world to let people set their burdens down. First responders, military, veterans and their families arrive carrying more than they should. On this ground, over five days, many of them begin to set it down.
We are deeply grateful to the Greater Tampa Bay Area Council and Sand Hill Scout Reservation for opening this land to the people who spend their lives protecting ours. Without a place, there is no program. This is our place.